Pencilnoob
@Pencilnoob@lemmy.world
- Comment on Did it really used to be common for guys to go to a bar every night like in Cheers or The Simpsons? 4 days ago:
It really is the dream
- Comment on Did it really used to be common for guys to go to a bar every night like in Cheers or The Simpsons? 4 days ago:
I live in a tiny NE college town where that happens but for breakfast at a dive coffeeshop. It’s loud, packed, the food and coffee are meh, but every single day I can walk in there and see 5-10 locals eating breakfast and shooting the breeze. There’s cliques who always sit together, and social butterflies who pick a different group every morning. A bottomless mug of coffee is $3, so folks will just come and hang out from like 8-11am. It’s great fun.
There’s a brewery next door that’s often busy at night but generally it’s a quiet town so folks are home chilling after dinner.
- Comment on a sight to behold 6 days ago:
scrubbing intensely … still not clean…
- Comment on xkcd #3156: Planetary Rings 1 week ago:
I know it blew my mind too when I first started building this! It’s such a cool project to get to build!
- Comment on xkcd #3156: Planetary Rings 1 week ago:
Wow thanks! If you like this, on Monday I’m planning to release an update that will let you rewind the viewer all the way back to 1959 and see the first launch of Sputnik. Then let it play forward to today sped up so you can see the growth of satellite counts. Also a new public API to fetch the TLEs from any date. I’m hoping this will let folks do interesting stuff with all that data - maybe AI training or research projects etc.
- Comment on xkcd #3156: Planetary Rings 1 week ago:
Yes, so I’m taking every telescope/radio/radar reading I’m allowed to redistribute and then collecting them into a time series database and fetching the most recent reading for each sat into a text file. That’s the TLE download in the public API. Then I use Rust WASM to propagate those readings into positions that are synced with the viewer time. This allows us to very roughly forecast where they will be for the next couple days.
It’s cool because it’s too much data to transfer over the network, so we only transfer the most recent reading and then calculate positions live in the browser.
- Comment on xkcd #3156: Planetary Rings 1 week ago:
Green is active, orange is debris or dead sats. When a GEO sat runs out of life / power / fuel the operators are supposed to move it out of the main corridor to make room, so often they are in the same ring but higher or lower
- Comment on xkcd #3156: Planetary Rings 1 week ago:
Yeah that’s what my one guy said was enough at the time, and we’ve got some European partners who never brought it up, so maybe it’s good enough with the banner?
- Comment on xkcd #3156: Planetary Rings 1 week ago:
I’m not familiar, what is the law, that we cannot use authentication cookies or google/twitter analytics cookies?
- Comment on xkcd #3156: Planetary Rings 1 week ago:
Indeed, that’s a joke I’m always saying, that every sat is the size of rhode island
- Comment on one bright second 1 week ago:
Yeah for all we know stars are black hole poop
- Comment on xkcd #3156: Planetary Rings 1 week ago:
Hey I am into this! Check out this site I built for tracking satellites!
- Comment on American cops think they're what American firemen ARE. 2 weeks ago:
Yuuup some really low taxes and also a lot of money gets turned into fighter jets and missiles which are of limited use in a structure fire unfortunately. If they asked me I’d shave off a cheeky 5% of our defense budget and turn it into emergency response but they don’t ask
- Comment on American cops think they're what American firemen ARE. 2 weeks ago:
Some are, for sure, but not all.
I know it’s corny, but thank you for your service. You know we still need your help to keep the fire service a welcoming place for new volunteers. Maybe you could sign back up at your new local in a more limited capacity? The more of us there are the better for everyone.
- Comment on American cops think they're what American firemen ARE. 2 weeks ago:
I’ve never met firefighter who carries a taser. We’ve got our hands full with crowbars, axes, ladders, hose, radio, thermal imaging camera, and air monitors. I legit don’t know where I’d even store a taser.
Maybe it’s fire police who are carrying tasers?
- Comment on American cops think they're what American firemen ARE. 2 weeks ago:
Every volunteer fire/EMS organization in the USA is struggling to keep the trucks filled. Most stations in the country are one or two volunteers away from just shutting down entirely.
If you can show up, please volunteer! My station desperately needs not just firefighters - these roles at my station are barely covered by a few overworked volunteers:
- accountants to track gear and vehicle deprecation and keep our books
- grant writers to get us new equipment
- social media people to spread the word
- photographers to tell a story at the fire scene
- cooks to help us with social events and build community
- mechanics to work on the apparatus
- drivers to drive the apparatus (even just back and forth to mechanic shops takes a lot of time)
- detailed people to inventory equipment / replacement schedules
- artists to make cool banners for community events
- people to manage renting out the building to the community to help pay for the station upkeep
- IT folks to help fix station Internet / manage digital records / select vendors / deal with station computers and email accounts
- Web developers to make and manage our website
- leadership to sit on the board and direct the organization
- finance people to help manage investments
Most fire companies would be thrilled to have someone show up and join as a member with the goal of just doing one or more of these roles. We don’t just need firefighters, we need a whole host of other things to keep the organization healthy and stable. We’ve seen what happens when these roles are neglected: we lose memberhip and when we lose membership we lose the bench needed to keep the trucks filled and ready to respond.
- Comment on What do ambulances do with patients cars? 4 weeks ago:
We leave them there and if it’s damaged call a tow truck to come pick it up. If it’s not damaged we’ll maybe drive it out of the way or see if a patient’s family member can come pick it up. Sometimes the cops will just have it towed anyway since it can’t just stay on the road.
- Comment on Is Star Trek Discovery that bad? 4 weeks ago:
The worst Trek is still better to watch than a heck of a lot of other TV
- Comment on Sportsball Is Self-Care 1 month ago:
narrator all three in denial are abusive to their loved ones
- Comment on Not trying to disparage first responders on 911. Why aren't nurses included with fire and police departments? Did we not take care of people on the backend of the rescuing? 1 month ago:
Keep in mind most firefighters in the USA are volunteers who just drive to the station when there’s a fire - not paid professionals.
My station just hired our first full time paramedics, we have a few part time paid firefighter+EMTs, and some volunteer firefighter+EMTs.
While we’re not getting that many fire calls, the few we get are pretty bad. Like, would burn down a neighborhood bad, because everything is now made from fast burning plastics. Sofas, carpets, house paint, siding, roofs, furniture, and clothes are all pretty much petroleum based. And will burn extremely hot and fast when it catches, spreading to all the surrounding exposure buildings.
My buddy works at Underwriters Laboratories and was saying they just did a burn test that showed the typical house today will catch neighboring houses on fire just from the infrared radiation through their windows. Even if the neighboring houses are soaking wet, the insides can still catch fire through the windows.
So we’re in a jam - we hardly ever have real house fires, but they are extremely dangerous and will burn the whole town down if we don’t get there asap.
Not to mention all the car crashes, hazmat spills, EMS lift assists. I’m sure there’s a way we can improve the situation, but I honestly don’t know what it would look like. The US is a huge place that’s very spread out, I don’t think we’re ever going to fully go away from volunteer firefighters, as much as I think it would be a good idea.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
I second this, a monitor is useful in so many more ways! It turns your phone into a whole computer. If you use Android, you can install a terminal and be able to do all kinds of cool stuff on it.
I put a computer monitor with an HDMI to usb C adapter in my kitchen so I can plug in my phone and put on MST3K while cooking.
It’s also useful because you can use it as an external monitor for another computer.
- Comment on Unsolicited. 2 months ago:
this is amazing
- Comment on AI is not bad for the environment in comparison with many other regular activities. 2 months ago:
I would be curious to compare that to Google search. Some experts estimate Google search and the time spent reviewing the results on your device can be 3-10g of Co2. The Google part alone is maybe .2g per search.
www.fastcompany.com/…/internet_impact_visualized
Here they estimated in 2018 that just rendering front page cost 300 tons a minute, so 432,000 tons a day. Just for the front page.
Just to put it in perspective that the Internet itself is not free. It’s expensive to power sending all this data around!
- Comment on If I wanted to bury a hard drive for archival purposes (e.g. Country becoming Dictatorship), how to keep the contents from being damaged and where is the safest place to bury it? 2 months ago:
If it’s small you might try printing the files on archival paper with archival ink. Then you can put copies in multiple safe deposit boxes. Also you could bury copies rolled up in plastic water bottles. I think those are unlikely to degrade anytime soon. Or glass bottles with plastic lids.
- Comment on Microwave Intensifies 3 months ago:
We didn’t use Pringles, I think it was these big peaches cans
- Comment on Microwave Intensifies 3 months ago:
I once made one of these with a bigger can and mounted it on an old 10’ satellite dish. Managed to get Wi-Fi across several thousand yards without issue
- Comment on Having the ability to lie and manipulate with no remorse will get you much further in this world than having morals and being correct 3 months ago:
I disagree, other than a few notable counter examples most times folks are only successful when they build reliable business relationships. Most relationships will dissolve if one party is playing games.
On average it’s more effective to follow “The No Assholes Rule”. There’s plenty of studies (referenced in the book Good To Great) that indicate that humble business leaders produce build more stable and long term profitable companies.
Lying manipulators can sometimes get ahead but just as often they get found out and blackballed.
I think it might be like a game theory type situation where if everyone is honest, then the first liar might get ahead a lot (although I suspect in that situation they’d immediately be shunned by all honest folk if found out). If everyone is a liar then honest folk have nothing to hide and probably will just be really defensive in their dealings.
- Comment on Hat. 4 months ago:
I’m playing through Another Crabs Treasure and this post gives me flashbacks
- Comment on Month-long awareness celebrations 4 months ago:
In Costa Rica elections are a whole thing, like everyone’s out with flags on cars and megaphones yelling about one of the 20+ political parties.
Also Semana Santa is a week long Catholic holiday.
- Comment on The history of societal collapses are all just examples of Universe 25 4 months ago:
Despite all my rage, I’m still just a rat in a cage